U.S. firm Concursive has released the first version of its ConcourseConnect Web platform. The open source product serves to build community websites with blogs, wikis, picture galleries and other interactive features.

Document archives, forums, tags and embedded ads supplement the offerings for online communities. For collaborative Web development, the software provides workgroups and and task lists. Concursive provides a few sample sites to demonstrate the capabilities of the software.

Version 1.0 is the first open release of ConcourseConnect. The open source package is under Affero GPLv3 (AGPL) licensing, an extended GPL that requires online services to provide source code on the server to network users under the same usage guidelines.

The ConcourseConnect sample sites include one for the gastronomy minded.

Sofware and documentation downloads are available at SourceForge. Next to the open source offering, Concursive also provides a cost-based Enterprise version with customer relationship management (CRM) features such as contact management and mail marketing, as well as enhanced administrative tools.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today published the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (GNU AGPLv3). The license based on version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPLv3) has an additional term to allow users who interact with the licensed software over a network to receive the source for that program. By publishing this license, the FSF aims to foster user and development communities around network-oriented free software.

The FTP team at the Debian project have decided that the Affero GPL version 3 licensing (AGPLv3) is consistent enough with the guidelines of the Linux distro that software with the licensing can go into Debian's main archive.